Remember the good old days of PC RPGs? When game boxes were stuffed with extra material and each title begged you to upgrade your system? CD Projekt certainly does, as The Witcher 2 feels like it dropped out of a time capsule from 2002. It’s quite a nostalgia trip, but you’d better bring a sickness bag, because you’ll quickly remember why we traded art books and soundtrack CDs for games that spent a few more months in quality assurance.

In his review for Alone in the Dark, Yahtzee imagines a conversation between two game developers named Terry and Gonad. Designer Terry presents the game’s good ideas, while programmer Gonad ruins them with terrible execution. The Witcher 2’s lofty aspirations are similarly grounded by poor implementation. Since I don’t have a video series nor a snarky British accent, I’ll do this with a regular HTML table.

This awesome feature…

is ruined because…

The regular $50 box comes with a soundtrack, behind the scenes DVD, map, papercraft and special coin

It has an activation code with no number/letter filters, letting you confuse the number one with the letter "i" and zero with the letter "o"

The game can be played without a disc in the drive

Its mandatory Internet activation failed for three hours during launch day

The launcher lets you set lots of graphical options

There's no simple explanation of what each one does nor which will affect the framerate the most

You don't need to be continuously online while playing

You must suffer through five little videos thanking the developer, publisher, nVidia, and other technology partners every time you start the game

The main menus are attractive and feature good typography

Every menu item must have a title and subtitle, leading to hilarious entries like "NEW GAME/Start a new game" and "OPTIONS/Adjust game options"

No confusing character creation at the beginning of the game

It opens with four pages of text on a pointless cloudy background with lots of hard-to-remember names and places that seem important but probably aren't

Starts the same as the first game: Geralt the amnesiac being pursued through a forest and falling unconscious

Lulz, that was just a dream: you're actually being tortured in prison for a crime you don't learn about for two hours

Geralt's a ruggedly handsome guy from the neck up

His body is an absolute mess of scars, somewhere between The Passion of the Christ and The Amateur Crocodile Hunter

The moral choices are so subtle that it's often difficult to tell whether you're just exploring a conversation tree or about to send someone to their doom

Crafting system lets you make your own weapons and armor, with easy to understand recipes and ingredients

Buying missing ingredients from shopkeepers is heinously expensive

Free day one DLC

You can't download it because their servers are apparently powered by Gameboy Advance

So that’s The Witcher 2. It’s a beautiful mess, and your only hope for a non-linear RPG until Skyrim comes out. If you’re going to buy this before the first eighteen patches come out, I wish you luck. Just remember that to die for Temeria is to die a good death!